DreamWorks founder Jeffrey Katzenberg said AMD Opteron processors, used in a new line of xw9300 workstations from Hewlett-Packard Co., will be "the preferred technology for animation development." Katzenberg added that the configuration has been tested in the development of DreamWorks' upcoming animated film, "Madagascar."

The announcement is an indication of Opteron's increased presence in high-end animation, rendering and visualization, which Ruiz predicted would extend into more phases of video post-production and audio production.

Jeff Wood, HP's marketing director, said the the xw9300 workstation is the first Windows- and Linux-compatible system based on a x16 PCI Express architecture that supports dual-core Opterons. HP is working with Matrox, nVidia, and Adobe on high-end graphics applications for the HP systems.

Charlie Boswell, AMD's director of digital media and entertainment at AMD, said development teams have been assigned to work with individual music studios, film development studios and independent digital video producers to optimize applications for multithreading and native 64-bit binaries.